Testament

I WAS BORN in thirty-two—that’s thirty-two—Denbigh Street; and it was January first, nineteen hundred and nothing. New Year’s day… That’s right. I came in with the bloody century and I’ll bloody-well be going out with it, too. What? Don’t be pulling faces, there, now. Listen, I’m only telling you the truth. —Is that thing on? What does it do? Oh, it’ll record everything I say? Good. Then, you won’t miss nothing. You’ll get the bloody lot. All of it. The whole truth. Then you’ll know too much, mind, but that’s on you. That’s not my problem. That’s on you. Okay, Peter…? Okay. Right…

I was born in thirty-two Denbigh Street; it was New Year’s Day. Not that anyone was celebrating nothing. Not a thing. Why would they? Another bloody mouth to feed. No one wanted that. And my father, well, he was away at sea, anyway. He was always bloody away at sea. Six months at a time. Longer. Twelve months. In fact, you hardly saw him one year from the next. That’s how it was… Whatever. The fact of the matter is, I was a good twelve months old before he set eyes on me for the first time, if I was a day. At least. But that’s how it was then. That’s all. See, listen, I’m telling you something now: in those days, listen to me, in those days they were the iron men on the wooden ships. They had to be… Now, it’s the other way around. This lot you’ve got now, on the ships and the docks and what have you, they wouldn’t know a hard day’s work. This shower, they’re all soft. Spoilt. Like, you. Soft lad. Our Little Frankie’s wife, Min, she had you spoilt right from the start. Couldn’t help herself, that one. She was proper soft-hearted. She had both of you bloody spoilt rotten in the end, I reckon. Our Little Frankie, the worst of the lot. For all the bloody good it did him…

…What? Who said what? Kelly? Kelly did? Kelly said that? What I just said? To who? To Little Frankie? Did he? Kelly? Well, how would Kelly bloody-well know? He never did a hard day’s work in his whole bloody life. He couldn’t’ve told you one end of a ship from the other if his life had depended on it. The bloody fool. A proper bloody fool, Kelly. Iron man? Don’t make me laugh. Soft as chalk, Kelly. The softest of the lot. …So, no, don’t go talking to me about bloody Kelly. Not after all this time. His is one ghost I don’t need pointing his bony finger at me in the dead of the night. No, let that one lie…

…Where was I? That’s it… My grandmother, the old Irish belle, she was; well, she said to my mother, when we first came over here, Dirty Liverpool, you won’t stop there long. But she was wrong. You see, my father was sailing in and out of Liverpool, so they did stop here, in Denbigh Street, and I was born, in number thirty-two. Then straightaway she moved us to number twenty-four because that was under a different landlord and the house had a vestibule door and glass cupboards to show the fancy china off. Not that we had any. But she was proper proud… She’d say to me, Don’t go telling anyone that you’ve got nothing because they don’t want to know you… So, me, I wouldn’t tell anyone. I was no one’s bloody fool, neither then nor now. Not ever…

Here, I hope you’re getting all this. You are? Good. This is your last chance. They won’t be taking me into no Connolly House, so, no… Those nuns are crazy, by the way… I never met a nun yet who wasn’t. Every last one of them. You can see it in their eyes… No, this is where I bow out. They won’t get me out of here, not alive. Not a chance. None…

…So, yes, my mother—she was awful proper proud. Disdainful. You couldn’t do right for doing wrong with her. And you didn’t want to cross her, ever, and I suppose I was the same. She made me that way. That’s how you had to be. To live. She didn’t suffer no fools. Never. She would’ve wiped the floor with the lot of you. One July, she took a kitchen knife to all the bloody Orange Lodge paraphernalia on the street, and no one turned a hair. Not one of them. They knew they’d get it next if they did. That’s how she was. And it never went back up, none of it. Not the year after, neither. Never again… That’s how you had to be to live. Hard. She taught me that. And just as well. Because all those years later when I lost my husband, I thought I’d never to able to keep house. I had three kids by then. I was twenty-three. I thought we’d never live. But we never wanted, I made sure of that. What? How? I took in laundry, didn’t I? Everyone’s socks and pants. I wasn’t proud, mind. Not like my mother in that regard, no; not me, I couldn’t bloody afford to be. And when our Freddie and our Frankie were old enough, I sent them out to work, the pair of them. I had to do that. Ten shillings, they brought in, between them. Ten bob a week. And so we got by. A miracle, that’s what it was… That’s how I thought then. A miracle…

Our Freddie, he had a proper head on his shoulders, believe you me. He did. Like my mother, he was, at least in that way, anyway. My father, well, if truth be known he couldn’t hardly read nor write, though he could turn a bet a dozen different ways in his head. He was clever in his own way, but my mother had the brains and that was the truth of it. And our Freddie was the same. They wanted him to stay on at the school, you know, at St James’s; they did, offered him a scholarship and everything to stay on and make something out of himself. He was that clever. Offered him the world, I suppose. The priests there did. Him and that Harry McGee, the boy who came back years later to be the headmaster there. Remember him? Your headmaster? Right. Well, I knew him when he had nothing, Harry McGee. I knew him when he had nothing and no bloody place to put it. His father was nothing but a miner like many around here and I never let him forget it, Harry McGee. His father only had the one lung and that was as black as coal. Pneumoconiosis. How’s your poor father’s breathing? That’s what I would say to Harry McKee whenever I saw him outside the school in the mornings. Him with his one black lung. Is he still coughing up half the bloody mine every morning, noon and night? God love him. Well, tell him I was asking after him, won’t you? And I’d be thinking, that could’ve been our Freddie, that. bloody headmaster. You’re no better than us, Harry McGee; and so don’t go flaming-well thinking you are.

Only, see, the thing was, our Freddie had to go out to work. That’s all. Fourteen, he was, and I got him a job in the Lead Works up there on Hawthorne Road. Scraping out the insides of those huge bloody barrels they boiled the lead in. But he didn’t like that much, I suppose, and a year later he was going away to sea. Like his father had before him. Cabin boy. He'd had the whole world at his feet, our Freddie, but he had to go follow in his father’s footsteps. Don’t go blaming me, I would say to him, you know better than that. But he did blame me, I reckon. Because everybody has to bloody blame someone… Not that he would say it, ever, but he did. I knew… But all I’d done was what I had to do, for us to live. There’s no blame in that. Or maybe there is, I don’t know…

You know, I’m not myself but I don’t know who I am… Not anymore. I’ve lived too bloody long. I feel like I’ve lived for a thousand years… I feel like I’ve lived forever and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I think maybe it’s time to try the other thing, see what that’s like…

Our Frankie? Our Father of Sorrows? Him? He was the biggest fool of the bloody lot, our Frankie was… Our Freddie, he knew things and the price of them. Our Frankie didn’t know anything, not a thing. Proper dunce. But, at the same time you couldn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. If you see what I mean? He always had an answer for everything, just never the right bloody answer. I tell you, no one was ever after him staying on school—he hardly ever went as it was. I should’ve washed my hands of him the night he messed up our Sissie’s wedding to the banker fellow from Southport. That was a sorry night, and we won’t dwell on that… Why not? I’ll tell you why not… Our Frankie coming back that night like he did with the pair of them drunk as lords. The banker? Yes, the bloody banker, too! A lot more than a drop taken, there, I can tell you. A lot more… Our Sissie, she was stopping the night in poor Mrs Dooley’s next door. She was another one, Old Drooly Dooley. Proper three sheets to the wind, she was. What a pair they made… I never did get it out of Sissie what she saw from out the back-bedroom window that night, but it was enough to put her off getting married. For life. Or maybe it was what bloody Dooley next door told her, the fool. About the birds and the sodding bees. Bah! I should’ve brained her there and then, Dooley. On the spot. It wouldn’t have helped but at least I’d have felt better. No, no point dwelling on that night. That’s one story no one needs to hear. Mistakes were made, let’s leave it there…

Our Sissie? What was wrong with her? Where do you want me to start? What was bloody right with her? Nothing, that’s what. Absolutely nothing. Not that she could help it. Those houses, see, they were slum houses. All right, yes, it was a slum, but it was my slum all the same. You never saw it, what it was like… They were damp, for one, all those houses, and old … Falling down. They were falling down the day they bloody built them, I reckon. You see, the worst thing was, they were infested, all of them. With what? With everything… Mice, cockroaches, all sorts… Rats out in the backyard, too, by the woodpile and the toilet. And there was nothing you could do about it. You couldn’t hardly keep them clean, those houses. Those slums… No hope of that. And the landlords, they didn’t care. In fact, they couldn’t have cared any less if they tried. And our Sissie, well, the thing was, she never got over that. She never got over her seeing the cockroaches crawling up the wall in the middle of the night, you know, as a little girl. And she never got over the rats, the mice, the what have you…slugs and the rest of it. One night—oh, that bloody terrible night—she only woke up one night in the war with a blasted mouse on her bloody head and I thought we’d never hear the last of it. The whole street could hear her, the way she carried on. I’ll tell you this much… I preferred the Germans and their bombs falling on us any night of the week to our Sissie going off on one like that. Any flaming night of the week at all. I can tell you that for nothing…

…If only, well, if only she’d married that banker like she was supposed to do. And, I’m telling you this now—our Frankie’s to blame that she never did. That one’s his fault. That’s on him. That one’s not on me. He’s to blame for that, our Frankie. Point your accusing fingers at him. Not me… If it had been our Freddie home on shore leave then and not soft lad, things might have been different, everything might not have turned like it did, all for the worse. But no... It was him, our Frankie, he did that, he's the one to blame for all that... Not me. 

What…Sissie? What became of her? The nuns took her in in the end, didn’t they? Nowhere else bloody would. Best place for her, too. Yes, Connolly House… Yes, the nuns took our Sissie but they won’t be taking me. To be honest, I don’t think God wants me… See, I tell Him the truth. And nothing but the truth. I don’t think He likes that. His priests don’t, anyway… I never met a priest yet who wasn’t about as much use to anyone as a dead cat. Pray, they say. That’s all they ever bloody say. Pray to the Lord and He will answer you. …Oh, I’ve prayed. That day the second telegram came, in the war, I mean… I got three in total but the one I mean now is the second one, the one about our Freddie on the Rangitane. That one…saying that he wasn’t lost at sea after all…that one. Well, the day that came I thought all my prayers had been answered at long last. I thought it was a bloody miracle.…

And then the story he told when he came home, our Freddie, about how his ship came to be sunk in the dead of the night, off the coast of South Africa, it was, with him and his mate, that Billy Nugent from Akenside Street, in nothing but their underwear, the pair of them, running for the lifeboats and soft lad Bily Nugent turning back to their cabin for the fancy new overcoat he’d bought in the last port—the fool—and then him not making it to the boat at all; well, I tell you, I thought it was an even bigger miracle, then, the fact that our Freddie had been blessed with the good sense to carry on running, new coat or no bloody new coat or what have you; and after that, him suffering for three weeks in an open boat on the high seas, in nothing but his vest and underpants in all weathers, day and night; for three weeks, watching the sharks and what have you circling the boat, Germans, that’s what he said; three whole weeks—and I still thought it was a bloody miracle…

But then, well, afterwards, he had to go back, didn’t he? He only had to go back… Back to sea, back to the war, not a month later… And that was that. Sunk by enemy action. That’s what came next. That’s what the next telegram bloody said. Then, then, I knew the truth, there are no miracles, or if there are, they’re temporary at best. Only for now… What’s the point in that? Two sons, I had, both going to sea in the war, and He saw fit to take the good one away from me when I needed him most. When? In 1941, this all was... That's the year I learnt the truth... There are no bloody miracles. And don't you forget it

I’m telling you this, now… Well, if you don’t believe me, if you don’t believe me, if my word’s not good enough for you, then look at all those bloody fools who must’ve brought me back, what, gallons and gallons of Lourdes water, it must be, literally gallons, over the years—every year they’d bring it back with them from their stupid coach-trips, their pilgrimages, in whatever they could… Big plastic lemonade bottles full of it. All sorts. Coke bottles. Scofield’s. Full of holy water. Every single year. And guess what? They’re all dead, they are, every last one of them. Miracle cures… I said to the priest, if I drink this will I live forever, do you think? And he answered me, Yes… You’re a liar, I said. No one lives forever… But I have, I suppose, so maybe he was right… But I can tell you this for nothing, for less than nothing, it’s not a miracle, this living forever, it’s a curse. A bloody curse…

Kelly? What do you keep bringing him up for? That fool? Kelly was nothing to me. Less than nothing. Proposed to me? Who told you that fairy tale? He only had one good eye, Kelly. Why would I want to marry him? No chance that was ever going to happen and I told him that straight. I sent him packing like I did everyone else. Where did he go? After that? I don’t know… Someplace, I suppose… We all got moved out before our houses—our homes, mind—were pulled down around us… Forty years I’d lived there in that house. Longer… And so, then, after that they put me over here, in my gilded cage; and, since they put me here, I’m stopping here. Nuns or no bloody nuns… They took our Sissie but they won’t be taking me, those crazy nuns. There’s more chance of me marrying Kelly than that happening—and he’s a long time dead. He must be… That’s what I heard, anyway. Someplace or other, I don’t know where… I heard he drank himself to death, like our Frankie. That’s what he did, too. Maybe I should try that? Yes? After, all, it seems like the popular choice around here… What do you think? Dodo? Here’s to your bad health, Nanna? What do you say? I thought so. …No, Kelly was nothing to me―less than nothing—and so don’t be thinking otherwise. And anything else you might’ve heard to the contrary isn’t true, so forget all about it. Do you understand me? Good… Because that’s a first. Nobody else ever bloody has. Neither you nor nobody else.

When is it New Year? Saturday? When’s that? Tomorrow? Good. Because I’ve had bloody enough. What do I mean by that? What do you think I bloody mean? It’s gone on too long. All this… Too bloody long by half. My father, my mother, my husband Freddie, our Freddie, our Frankie, our Sissie, Little Frankie, his Min, that fool Kelly, Drooly Dooley next door, all came and went and for what? What was the point? What’s the point of any of it? Oh, you believe? You believe in bloody miracles, do you? Well, that’s your look out. Do you believe in leprechauns, too? You always were the stupidest one of the lot. You know I’m not even your proper Nanna, don’t you? They only took you in, our Little Frankie and his soft-hearted Min did. You know that? You don’t care?… Good for you… So, listen, you tell me, then; why do you believe? You? Why? You’ve heard all this, now. Why? Answer me that. …You don’t know. Well, I don’t bloody know, either… It must be the way you’re made. That’s all. The way you are. That must be the only blessing there is. I don’t know. Luck, that’s all it is.…

You, go on—you can turn it bloody-well off now. I’ve had enough. Go on. That’s your lot.

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